A Leeds yarn shop with a Yorkshire mission.

Baa Ram Ewe started as a wool shop in Leeds. Companies House records show that Baa Ram Ewe Limited was incorporated in March 2009, registered as a specialist retailer, with Verity Britton as its director from the first day. In a statement published on the company’s blog in August 2019 and signed “Verity, founder of baa ram ewe,” she wrote that she had opened the business in 2009 “to put Yorkshire’s unique and often undervalued wool heritage back on the world map.” The brand writes its own name in lower case, as “baa ram ewe”; we use capitals here for readability.

The shop was in Chapel Allerton, a suburb in north Leeds. A 2018 post on the company’s blog said it had moved into a new store there three years earlier, had added two people to the team since, and sometimes had up to six people working in one room — serving shop customers, photographing products, running the website and handling international trade accounts. The shop sold other makers’ yarns and patterns alongside its own; archived pages list British and international brands among its stock.

The founder’s 2019 statement set out why she had started. In 2009, she wrote, acrylic yarns still dominated the trade, and “even historic Yorkshire brands such as Rowan, Sirdar, King Cole and Ramsdens were largely spinning abroad”; the common view, she said, was that British wool was “only good for carpets.” That is her account rather than an independent survey, but it explains the brand’s focus. Compare Sirdar and Rowan, two of the Yorkshire names she mentioned.

Titus, breeds and a stated masterplan.

Baa Ram Ewe’s first yarn was Titus. A company blog post dated May 2017 said that summer marked five years since its launch, which places it in 2012, with an official birthday in August; the company marked the anniversary with an event at the Leeds shop. Other ranges followed, including a Dovestone line, and the company published pattern books built around its yarns, among them a collection reworking vintage designs from the archive of Sirdar.

The company stated its aim plainly. An archived “mission statement” page from 2020 reads: “Our masterplan is to make Yorkshire famous for wool production across the world once more, reconnecting it to its woolly heritage.” In her 2019 statement the founder said she was proud of the contribution the business had made to promoting “Yorkshire spun yarns” and the popularity of local breeds such as the Wensleydale and the Masham, and claimed it had ploughed tens of thousands of pounds back into the local economy. Those are the company’s own claims.

Like many small yarn brands, Baa Ram Ewe designs its yarns and has them made by others. Its website today says it works “closely with farmers, spinners, and dyers across the UK.” Its FAQ says the British wool in its yarns is graded by hand by the British Wool Board and “then scoured, spun and dyed in the UK, with a small amount dyed by specialist dyers in Europe,” and that its alpaca comes from Peru. One range is named: the company says its Donegal Twists yarn is “designed by the Baa Ram Ewe team” and made at Donegal Yarns’ woollen mill in Kilcar, in Ireland. The pages we checked do not name the UK mills that spin its other yarns.

The current ranges include Woodnote, a blend of Bluefaced Leicester, Masham and Merino; Eden, which the company describes as GOTS-certified organic British wool with alpaca; and Pip, small balls of 4-ply wool for colourwork. Titus itself no longer appears among the yarns on sale, though pattern books carrying its name do.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell British yarn for hand knitting and crochet: West Yorkshire Spinners, John Arbon, Baa Ram Ewe, Blacker Yarns, Laxtons, Uist Wool and Fyberspates. They share a country, but not a way of making yarn, and the difference between them says a good deal about what is left of Britain’s wool industry.

Britain once spun yarn on an industrial scale, and the mills that remain are a small fraction of what there was. Some brands still own the machinery that turns fleece into yarn. Others design yarns and colours and pay a mill — at home or abroad — to spin them, which is how much of the modern yarn trade works. Between the two sit firms that do part of the work themselves, such as dyeing or blending, and buy in the rest. A brand’s label rarely makes clear which kind of company it is.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is spun and dyed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A shop closed, a company wound up, a brand kept.

The shop did not last. In the same August 2019 statement the founder announced that the business had begun converting into a community interest company, a form of social enterprise, and that the Leeds shop would close at the end of trading on 21 September 2019; online sales and yarn shows would continue. She wrote that keeping the shop open had added to the company’s debts. We found no community interest company of that name in the Companies House register. In October 2019 the company’s registered office moved from Leeds to a business centre in Wetherby.

In early 2021 the company said a crowdfunding campaign had raised £16,020, which it called “pivotal in the survival of our business,” and said it would add local artisan products to its range. Later that year the original company was wound up: Companies House shows a resolution to wind up in August 2021, a creditors’ voluntary liquidation, and dissolution in August 2022. Archived copies of the website show it redirecting or offline from late 2021 through 2022.

The brand came back. By late 2023 the website was trading again, from Wetherby, with new ranges and a wholesale section for shops. Its terms say only that the site is “operated by baa ram ewe,” and its privacy policy still names the original limited company, so we could not establish from public records who owns the brand today.

For a design guide, Baa Ram Ewe shows how a small retailer built a brand on regional identity — Yorkshire breeds, Yorkshire place names — rather than on a mill of its own. Compare West Yorkshire Spinners, which spins in the county, and Sirdar. For this guide we use moorland green and undyed cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Baa Ram Ewe’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.